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Monday, 9 May 2011

Different Types of Internet Scams, How Scammers Operate and How to
Avoid Them

Scamming is a very famous way of fooling others and making big amount of money in a short span of time. Scammers can be everywhere and one of their most popular places is the Internet.

Different Types of Scams

Identity Theft This is when the scammers get your personal information without your permission. This can be done via websites that allow cookies or files that may carry malwares that steal user’s information.

Lottery Scams These are emails declaring that you are a lottery winner. Hence, there is no true big lottery money for you. They will ask for your personal information and a certain amount of money for processing fees.

Phisher Scams These are emails from seems to be legitimate persons or companies. They will ask you your personal information and provide you links to bogus websites.

False Scams These are emails asking you for help to get a large amount of money, promising you a certain percentage of the amount in return to your kindness. Hence, there is no big money existing.

General Scams These scams are common in purchasing or bidding online. Scammers cheat their victims to get the products for either free or at very low costs. They also trick victims to pay for a certain product without any returns.

How Scammers Operate

Harvesting Emails Email is a key of an online user to their many accounts on the internet. That is why scammers are very active in emails. There are several ways on how they harvest emails.

Capturing Emails Scammers will go to different websites and copy or crawl emails. Some even copy the names and other personal information in order for them to look like valid senders.

Random Emails Scammers will guess various emails. If the scam is successfully sent to a certain address, then that is a valid email.

Hacking Scammers will hack several databases to gather various emails and personal information for their malicious activities.

Shilling The sellers have partners bidding for the product price higher so it will be sold higher. This is common to many bidding or auction sites.

Bid Shielding Two bidders will bid for the product, one will bid at a very low price and the other will bid at a very high price so it will be difficult for others to bid. When the time counter ends, the high price bidder will withdraw and the seller will end up selling the product at a very low price.

False Web Contents Promises are posted on a website yet none of them are true. The deceived victims will end up paying for nothing.

Faked Websites Scammers will create a “look a like” website of a certain existing website to make the victim believe that they are browsing the real one.

Failure Merchandise DeliveryProduct delivery is a failure despite that it is already paid.

Faked Photos Scammers will edit images and make it seems to be so persuading to purchase. Hence, the true product is not that enticing.

Pirated or Leaked Downloads Scammers will display seemed to be legal software or files and will ask for payment. Since pirated or leaked, they can also offer the prices in lower rates in order to gain more paying customers.

There are so many unaware victims online. Hence, by simply learning the above scammer schemes, you can save yourself and be more alert when you see one of the above attacks.